Way past bedtime here in my time zone, will answer your queries tomorrow

Does this mean then that if PLDT is back on top again, its slow internet all over again. back to the dark ages?

Telecommunication, like water and electricity, is a natural monopoly essentially selling the same product to captive customers. So called competition in the industry is a charade because all players will just end up forming a sort of cartel. Super mergers like that of ATT, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Comcast reveals the illusion of competition. The least you’ll get is a doupoly.

Historian Daniel Stedman Jones has similarly said that the term “is too often used as a catch-all shorthand for the horrors associated with globalization and recurring financial crises”

The only arbiter against player abuse is government regulation and neoliberals like Manuel Pangilinan hate regulations. If Duterds managed to whip their asses and compel them to improve their services, well, that’s in Duterte’s plus on the report card.

MVP is the Philippines’ equivalent of Mexico’s Carlos Slim – the super billionaire who is also into telecom, real estate, media, transportation, energy, casino, and banking. I’ve heard Pangilinan’s Metro Pacific is also even into garbage hauling and sewerage, the things these people wouldn’t leave un-privatized.

I still can’t formulate what a neo-lib does, and what a non-neo-lib would do. Pangilinan seems more crony than political, and capitalists hate regs, too, if they hurt the business. People who don’t pay taxes are neo-libs? Color me confused.

ps, I was jumped on by about 50 leftists on twitter the other day. They called me a neo-lib, a centrist, and a fascist. So it seems to me the left doesn’t know either, but can tag as well as Parlade.

But the question is how close is he to Kiko? Says nephew in that fb post that doesn’t seem to be showing.

Neoliberalism is essentially an intentionally imprecise stand-in term for free market economics, for economic sciences in general, for conservatism, for libertarians and anarchists, for authoritarianism and militarism, for advocates of the practice of commodification, for center-left or market-oriented progressivism, for globalism and welfare state social democracies, for being in favor of or against increased immigration, for favoring trade and globalization or opposing the same, or for really any set of political beliefs that happen to be disliked by the person(s) using the term. Phillip W. Magness “Neoliberalism is also, according to some scholars, commonly used as a pejorative by critics, outpacing similar terms such as monetarism, neoconservatism, the Washington Consensus and “market reform” in much scholarly writing. The Handbook of Neoliberalism, for instance, posits that the term has “become a means of identifying a seemingly ubiquitous set of market-oriented policies as being largely responsible for a wide range of social, political, ecological and economic problems”. Its use in this manner has been criticized by those who advocate for policies characterized as neoliberal.: 74 The Handbook, for example, further argues that “such lack of specificity [for the term] reduces its capacity as an analytic frame. If neoliberalism is to serve as a way of understanding the transformation of society over the last few decades then the concept is in need of unpacking”. : 2 On the other hand, many scholars believe it retains a meaningful definition. Writing in The Guardian, Stephen Metcalf https://loansolution.com/title-loans-al/ posits that the publication of the 2016 IMF paper “Neoliberalism: Oversold?” helps “put to rest the idea that the word is nothing more than a political slur, or a term without any analytic power”.”